Panasonic LUMIX GF1 Unboxing and First Impressions
This is an unboxing and first impressions video of the Panasonic LUMIX GF1 [affiliate], easily the most unique camera I've ever had the opportunity to look at. It's similar to a DSLR in that you can change lenses, but the micro four-thirds system doesn't use a pentaprism or mirror, so it's not a DSLR (which I think I got wrong in one of these videos when I said it was a DSLR). Panasonic calls it a DILC: Digital Interchangeable Lens Camera. I don't see "DILC" taking off as a term, because it sounds vaguely dirty, but this camera is hot stuff...it's been selling out everywhere, and Panasonic is struggling to keep up with demand. It uses SD cards and supports SDHC, so you can slap a 32 GB memory card in there for a massive amount of pictures and videos.
The GF1 has a 12.1 megapixel Live MOS sensor (17.3 x 13.0mm in size), capturing JPEG or raw images at a maximum resolution of 4000 x 3000 pixels. It's also capable of 720p video capture (1280 x 720) in either AVCHD Lite or MJPEG formats. It can shoot in burst mode, up to three frames per second, and can capture in a variety of aspect ratios: 4:3, 3:2, 16:9, and 1:1 (square - which puzzled me for a moment in the video). You can check out the full specs at Panasonic's site.
To give you a little preview of my review, so far I'm loving using this camera. The 20mm lens is f/1.7, so it's really fast and great for available light photography. The micro four-thirds system has a 2x lens multiplication factor, so it's a 40mm lens. Not wide angle, but it doesn't force you to take steps back either. This camera is really high on the "fun factor" - it's a joy to use and I have very few complaints about it so far.
Jason Dunn owns and operates Thoughts Media Inc., a company dedicated to creating the best in online communities. He enjoys photography, mobile devices, blogging, digital media content creation/editing, and pretty much all technology. He lives in Calgary, Alberta, Canada with his lovely wife, and his sometimes obedient dog. He's still searching for the ultimate netbook.
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Great unboxing, Jason! I thought long and hard about whether to get a real DSLR or one of these micro four-thirds cameras, and I ended up going the safe route with the 7D. But I'm still very interested in these. I look forward to the full review.
So the obvious next contest challenge is to come up with the best acronym for this type of camera. So far we've got DILC and EVIL (electronic viewfinder interchangeable lens--hmm, not really applicable here since there's no electronic viewfinder, per se). Both are quite terrible, IMO. It'd be fun to see what others can come up with.
Oh, one other quick thing. Any chance you could include the fullscreen button when you embed YouTube videos? I always watch these in full screen and it requires that I click through to YouTube to do so. No biggie, but if it's easy, it'd be a nice convenience.
Oh, one other quick thing. Any chance you could include the fullscreen button when you embed YouTube videos? I always watch these in full screen and it requires that I click through to YouTube to do so.
I'd love to, but YouTube doesn't give us that option on the embeddable player - the full screen option is only on their own site. I can't blame them for that, they want you to see their ads and click on them. I'll ask Darius if there's a hack we could implement to get this though...
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Great unboxing, Jason! I thought long and hard about whether to get a real DSLR or one of these micro four-thirds cameras, and I ended up going the safe route with the 7D.
I personally wouldn't give up my DSLR for anything; my D300 still rocks the socks off the GF1 in low-light with my f/2.8 lens. But if you're a camera nut like me, the GF1 makes for a truly great second camera. And I think for many people, this form-factor of camera is a great choice instead of an intro-level DSLR (Canon Rebel, Nikon D3000, etc.). I think 2010 will be the year we see a response from Canon and Nikon to this...
Quote:
Originally Posted by ptyork
So the obvious next contest challenge is to come up with the best acronym for this type of camera. So far we've got DILC and EVIL (electronic viewfinder interchangeable lens--hmm, not really applicable here since there's no electronic viewfinder, per se).
Maybe m4/3.
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Or for any future ones using other sensors and lens mounts. Definitely needs a category designation all its own.
Quote:
YouTube doesn't give us that option on the embeddable player
Actually there's no hack involved. Simply add the allowfullscreen parameter and set it to "true". Need to add it both as an attribute of the embed tag AND as a param tag within the object tag. It's now part of the default embed code coming from YouTube.
Actually there's no hack involved. Simply add the allowfullscreen parameter and set it to "true". Need to add it both as an attribute of the embed tag AND as a param tag within the object tag. It's now part of the default embed code coming from YouTube.
Right you are! Turns out though that TinyMCE, the toolbar control we use in our CMS, doesn't seem to like that part of the code, and keeps breaking it. There's no fix other than for us to manually use the YouTube embed code. What we need is for TinyMCE to fix the darn bugs...
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Nice camera, my friend. Of course, I saw some images already on your blog, and it seems you're having a ball with it. I'm still undecided if I go for the GF1 (or 2 by that time...), or the Olympus E-P2. It's a decision between AF speed and sensor stabilization / usability of my existing four thirds lenses. One thing I'm sure of: that lens you have is awfully nice!
Oh, and in the Four Thirds forums the notion of this type of camera (DSLR without the mirror box needed for the optical viewfinder) went by the name EVIL (Electronic Viewfinder Interchangable Lenses). :-)
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Panasonic LUMIX GF1 Unboxing and First Impressions
What we need is for TinyMCE to fix the darn bugs...
Hybrid Mode
